In Arcadia: How Soldiers Become Mermaidsunder-water archeology & water museum

The film and performance are a poetical gesture in re-thinking the premises of memory and colonial debris for which Halfmoon camp in Wünsdorf was a significant part of German colonial history.In the film footage, the two artists are to be seen in Wünsdorf, on the location of the former „HalfMoon“ camp and its neighbour lake, a colonial camp where Arabic, Indian and African POWs from British and French colonial troops largely from Muslim backgrounds were retained together from 1914 until 1919.On this site, the linguistic researcher and founder of the Berliner Lautarchiv, Wilhelm Doegen recorded numerous languages and songs in the frame of his project, the „Worldarchive“, a monumental project that aimed to fix the world cultural heritage on European ground. The voices of these Prisoners of War heard in this film are archived in The Humboldt Lautarchiv and Ethnologisches Museum in Berlin.

What kind of traces did these voices leave behind and where do these memories grow?

The Wünsdorf See surrounding the former camp and the former location of the camp itself becomes the grounding station for an archaeology of colonial memory where the testimonies and bodies of these soldiers become buried underground and in the waters evolving into new forms of water ecosystems.They are the metaphors for Mami Watas; water mermaids debris of the flesh turned into a mythical creature both human and fish and changes forms in order to move across waters and continents.This enables memory to activate in the contemporary space when considering the politics of immigration, identity and homeland.​The film is a fictional archeological museum archive depicting selected debris and photography from the archives of Dahlem museum and the Garnisson military museum. The artists include themselves in this complex landscape and therefore also ask the question of the position of the women in the colonial project of « fixing languages and culture » in a « Weltarchiv ». They underline the absence of women voices in this big classification project, obviously not considered as producers or transmitors of culture and knowledge but always present. They are pattern in the song but their own voice is not to be heard. They are mentioned as wives, daughters, lovers, sometimes motherland. They are a body and they are a dream towards emancipation. Never they are a voice. The performance and the film wish to acknowledge the life, voice and role of the women in the anti-colonial and resistance movements prominent in Berlin, Cameroon and Namibia.Halfmoon camp tells therefore not only the story of men prisoners of war, sons and fathers, but through their voices they reveal the lives of the legacy of women fighting for resistance against colonial oppression across 3 continents. They are wives, daughters, sisters, mothers, lovers, mermaids. They are made visible through the soldiers' memories, testimonies and songs. The artists wish to make visible a legacy towards the post-colonial dream and this debris’ significance towards our contemporary experience.